I don't think it would be plain text would it? The files that they are downloading files are files like PDF and DOC, etc... Also, the clients would be using SSL( https ). The code I included originally is a lot simpler than what is going on....There is already security in place to handle user authentication and authorization to files via a web interface. I'm looking for help with perl code to encrypt the files( again, I'm think gpg ). And then, when a user logs in and clicks a link to download the file, the file is decrypted and the user downloads the file. I don't want to just make a decrypted copy of the file upon request, serve it up to the user and then delete the file. I need to handle it smarter than that since multiple end users can be accessing the same file at the same time. Any more help would be greatly appreciated.